


Life Goes On

by wilde_stallyn



Category: Welcome to Life: the singularity ruined by lawyers (Tom Scott video)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, M/M, Mortality, Science Fiction, Virtual Reality, characters with questionable ethics, fucked-up relationship dynamics treated romantically, mediocre people making the best of a bad situation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:52:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilde_stallyn/pseuds/wilde_stallyn
Summary: For someone with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Jon is a terrible businessman. For Myles, though, Jon's his whole world.





	Life Goes On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kandrona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kandrona/gifts).



The thing about AI dogs, Myles thinks as he herds his two matching Irish setters back into the house, is that they still want to be taken for walks, even if there's no chance of them peeing on your carpet. 

He walks into the living room and sighs. He knows punctually is not his husband's strong point, but he hasn't visited in five days, and he was supposed to be here three hours ago. “Gerald, where's Jon?” he asks. “he said he was going to plug in today.”

A disembodied voice with a mild British accent replies, “Jon's phone's GPS shows him at Stanford Hospital.”

“What!? The hospital? Give me his screen.” 

A glowing blue screen materializes in front of Myles, the location tag reading: Room A3004, Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, CA. Myles hits the camera button and gets a dark screen. He switches to the front facing camera, and this time sees an off-white ceiling and the tops of pale green walls. He turns on the phone's mic.

“Don't be ridiculous, Jon,” a smarmy voice is saying, one Myles unfortunately recognizes as Aaron Sanderson, CEO of Life Digital Personality Management Inc., “of course you want to be uploaded to Life. You don't want to die, do you?”

“I'm not letting you put your hands all over my mind, Aaron,” Jon replies, his voice weak and rasping, and now Myles is really starting to panic.

“But, sir,” another voice cuts in. This time it's Diana Garret, head of Life's PR department. “You have to join the network. Can you imagine what it would look like for the company if Life's inventor and founder was known to have refused to be uploaded? It would be a disaster! We have already had half a dozen journalists put in requests to get your exclusive first post-death interview!”

Myles can't listen to anymore of this. He hits the call button and hears his ringtone sound in the hospital room.

Jon picks up the phone slowly, saying, “If you two wouldn't mind, I need to take this in private.”

Aaron sighs. “Alright, Jon, but we're not finished with this conversation.”

Myles hears the door close behind them, and then Jon's haggard face appears on screen. 

“Myles,” he says. “I'm sorry I couldn't call you sooner. Aaron jumped on me as soon the doctors left.”

“Jon, what happened? Why is Diana talking about post-death interviews!?”

“Apparently, I had a heart attack. The doctors tried to fix what they could but something's gone really wrong in there. They don't think I'm going to make it out of here.”

“Oh,” Myles says faintly, around the knot in his throat. “And Aaron wants to upload you to Life?”

Jon scowls. “Yeah, he noticed that I'm not backed-up with them, I guess. Most people working at Life are backed-up pretty regularly, but I managed to avoid it. Too much of a risk of them finding out about you.”

Myles bit his lip. “You are backed-up here, though, right?”

Something in Jon's voice is off when he replies, “Yeah, babe. Don't worry about it.” 

It's not that Myles thinks Jon's lying, per-say, more that there's something more complicated he's not saying that he thinks Myles won't understand the technical side of. Myles has picked up a bit of programming over the years, enough to follow some of the less esoteric of Jon's ramblings at least, but he's never had much of a head for those sorts of things. 

When they met, Myles had just gotten his first job after college, teaching social studies to fifth graders, and Jon was a brilliant PhD candidate at MIT. Four years later, they got married and moved to California so Jon could take a post-doc position to work on AI at Stanford. 

Myles loved California. The school system was a mess, but the ability to get out in nature made up for it. He only got to enjoy the real version for a couple of years though, before his health started going down hill. By the time the doctors worked out that his abdominal pain was caused by a tumour in his pancreas, it was too late to do much about it.

Jon was working on a project at the time that involved taking brain scans from dozens of subjects to analyze them in order to build an AI system modelled on the human brain. One night, a few of weeks after they learned Myles' cancer was terminal, Jon dragged him down to his lab at the University late at night. He said he wanted to take a scan of Myles brain, like a picture to remember him by, but better because it would be more _him_ than any photo of his face. It was wildly against University policy, and the ethics board would have had a field day if they knew, but how could Myles possibly deny him whatever comfort he could find? 

Lying in a big metal tube with a freaky-looking device strapped to his head was the last thing Myles remembered of being alive. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in this virtual world. Jon told him that he had lived another eight months after the brain scan was taken, and it took five years after his death of Jon working frantically in secret to figure out how to recreate a working, conscious system from that scan, but to Myles it was like suddenly travelling forward in time to a point when you've been dead to everyone you ever knew for years, and you have to stay a secret from all but the one who brought you there.

The virtual world Jon built for Myles was quite limited in those early days, just a model of the house they had lived in together in California and Gerald, the overarching AI that allowed Myles to interact with the system, who he tended to think of as a sort of virtual butler. It was intended to just be a prototype. The original plan was for Jon to start a company and hire a team that could build a much larger, more robust, and varied network than Jon could manage to program on his own, and once it was up and running, slip Myles on there with no one the wiser. But then the lawyers got their hands on Life and the prospect started to look somewhat less appealing. 

For someone with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Jon is a terrible businessman. The start-up costs for developing Life proved much higher than he had reckoned, and by the time of launch he was only able to hold on to a 49% stake in the company. He has remained involved, continuing to lead the AI development team for years, but found himself pushed out of the larger business decisions. 

Instead, he's spent more and more of his time locked in his home office, building out Myles' secret world. He created a neighbourhood for him, and populated it with a host of AI personalities. When he can, he steals bits of code from those Experience Apps that Life develops internally, so with a word to Gerald they can be at their favourite ski lodge in the Alps, or take a sculpture class. It isn't a terrible existence, Myles usually manages to keep himself busy, and he really is grateful for all the work Jon puts into building him new diversions, but sometimes he wishes Jon would spend a bit less time in his office coding, and more time plugged in, visiting Myles in person. 

“What aren't you telling me, Jon?” Myles asks, but Jon doesn't have an opportunity to respond before they are interrupted by a commotion in the hallway. Jon hastily mutes Myles' voice on the phone and puts it back on the bedside table, though this time he props it up so that Myles' camera has reasonable view of the hospital room. 

The door opens and Aaron comes back in, this time accompanied by a pair of technicians, one of whom is carrying a helmet-like device bearing the Life logo.

“I was hoping we could do this the easy way, Jon,” Aaron says, “but you will be uploaded to Life one way or another.”

“You can't just take my brain scan against my wishes,” Jon replies, incredulous.

“Actually, I think you'll find I can. Our legal team assures me that your shareholder's agreement bars you from any course of action that could negatively impact the company image, and allows us to claim your mental imprint as a company asset.“ Aaron waves the technicians forward. “Please proceed.”

There's a struggle as Jon tries to keep the apparatus away from his head.

Aaron turns to a nurse who is hovering awkwardly by the door, holding a syringe. “I think it's time the patient be sedated before he hurts himself, don't you?”

The nurse looks reluctant, but moves towards the bed.

Then Jon yells, “Gerald, code red!” and Myles screen goes black.

A moment later Jon appears in front of him. Not the elderly, wan Jon from the hospital, but the younger version he uses as his avatar in Myles' world. He takes in Myles' shocked expression. “What's wrong, love?” he asks, confusion in his voice. “And where's Marie-Claire? I thought we were going golfing.”

“What? Golfing?” Myles gapes at him. “Jon, what are you doing here? You were just in the hospital! Aaron was-”

“The hospital?” Jon interrupts. “No, I'm at home. My body's in the VR stasis bed, like always. I was just talking to you on the phone five minutes ago.”

“No, Jon, you had a heart attack! You said the doctors didn't think you were going to make it out of the hospital, and Aaron was trying to upload you to Life, and then you yelled something about 'Code red' to Gerald and everything went black!”

Jon freezes, his eyes going wide. “Oh,” he says, sitting down heavily on the sofa. “I didn't think we would actually have to use it.” he says softly. 

Myles sits down beside him. “Use what? Jon, what's going on?” he asks, but Jon just stares his hands as though in shock.

“Excuse me, Myles,” Gerald's voice cuts in, “if I may explain.”

Gerald's avatar appears and puts a hand on Myles' shoulder, and Myles knows the situation must be very serious. Gerald rarely feels the need to call up his sensorial form, preferring to complete most tasks incoporeally by manipulating the world directly on the program level. The handsome older gentleman standing beside him in a neat suit is really just for Myles' benefit.

“Code Red is the trigger for a last-resort fail-safe measure Jon wrote into my program. When he triggered it from the hospital, I deadlocked the system to prevent any interference from the outside and activated Jon's most recent back-up.” He gestures to the Jon on the sofa. “In this case, the scan from last Thursday, when Jon came to join your golf game with Marie-Claire.”

“But what about the real Jon?” Myles asks. “What's going on at the hospital. Is he okay?”

Gerald shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Myles, I just don't know. The phone is no longer functional, and the deadlock is set so no further information can get into or out of the system. We are on our own,and we have no way of knowing what might be going on in the wider world. If Jon survives and is able to return to the house, he may be able to break his own defences, but they were designed to go up and stay-up, no matter what, so even he might not be able to override them.”

“So, what? We just...wait?”

Jon looks up and reaches out to grip Myles' hand. “No, my body doesn't matter, we've got to assume that it will die soon and move on with our lives, just us, here.

“My will leaves the house, with all our servers and backup-systems, to my nephew, Jason, and he is under strict instructions to keep them running, but not interfere. He doesn't know we're in here, but he does know that there are sentient AIs who will die if the system is dismantled.

“We also have to assume that Arron got his brain scan and will upload a copy of me to Life. If he actually has his team dig through my thoughts before they rearrange them, he'll know we are here, so we are going to have to hope he will be satisfied with his puppet version of me defending his bottom line and leave us alone. Though if he does decide to come after us and manages to get his hands on the systems, he will first need to figure out which server we're on before his team can even start to crack it. I've set up a couple of decoys that should look like much more likely targets, and made this one look like it just houses some innocuous AI.” Jon grimaces. “Even if no one on the outside tries to mess with us, though, the system can't be updated anymore. I'm sorry, Myles, I won't be able to program anything new into the world.”

“Hush,” Myles says, as he pulls Jon into a hug. “We'll be fine with what we have. I've got you, and we've got Gerald, and Marie-Claire, and the puppies, and everyone and everything else you've created over the years. We don't need a new alpine ski adventure or another scuba spot.” 

Jon swallows. “The system will fail eventually though. Something will go wrong and no one will be able to fix it.”

Myles pulls back enough to look Jon in the face, a small smile quirking his lips. “So what you're saying is, we're back to being mortals? We live our lives until something goes wrong and suddenly ends our existence?”

Jon smiles tentatively back. “Yeah, but maybe death isn't as scary as it used to be.”


End file.
